Monday, April 30, 2018

The good news for all of us is that the president says what he means and he means what he says. So this is very reassuring:

In the days leading up to a key vote last week over the fate of his nominee for secretary of state, President Trump found a way to win over one of the biggest skeptics in the Senate.

Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), a rare isolationist Republican, was signaling that he would oppose Trump’s pick, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a hawkish former congressman who had backed the Iraq War.

But the more Trump and Paul spoke, including three calls last Monday, the more assured Paul became that the president was moving back toward the non-interventionist world view that Trump had championed on the campaign trail. The conversations left Paul with a particularly enticing notion: that Trump was prepared to end the war in Afghanistan.

“The president told me over and over again in general we’re getting the hell out of there,” Paul said in an interview Thursday in his Senate office. “I think the president’s instincts and inclination are to resolve the Afghan conflict.”

Sure, right. And his word is like oak.

Count on it.

But look at this inane headline:

Uhm no. He told Rand what he needed to hear so that he would have something to say when he voted for Pompeo. He knows that they are all a bunch of warmongers slavering for the chance to bomb the shit out of someone.

I'm sure Rand will be very disappointed when Trump doesn't actually withdraw from Afghanistn which has never been his plan. He wasn't to "win" in Afghanistan which means "taking the oil" or in this case minerals. To the victor belongs the spoils. And Rand knows that very well. It's just that his "brand" is being the libertarian isolationist hero so everyone has to do this dance to allow him some way to be an unreconstructed wingnut while still collecting all that cash.